Burning down the house

I’ve never been one for ‘clubbing’. From a very young age, I concluded that if I wanted to meet girls – and that was what I assumed the whole point of it was – nightclubs were not the place to do it. Of course, the girls would be there, but so would the terrible music, the terrible beer and the terrible hassle of trying to get home in the early hours when all the buses had returned to the depot. Even if I met the girl of my dreams, the odds are she’d want to make further visits to nightclubs. Why take the chance? So I never went clubbing, save the ‘heavy night’ at Tiffanys’ in Clifton, and even that was for the music and little else. But it was still very sad to read about the fire that has gutted the SWX club in Bristol.

SWX has had plenty of different names over the years, starting with Top Rank, Romeo & Juliets, Papillons, Odyssey, The Works, Syndicate and now SWX. To the best of my knowledge, I have been there on two occasions for different acts.

More recently, I went to see the brilliant Jordan Rakei and his band play a stellar set. The first time was slightly more embarrassing: TV’s New Faces winner ventriloquist Roger De Courcey with Nookie Bear. As you may have gathered from the bear’s name, the entire show was one long nudge, nudge, wink, wink of dubious comedy and in this setting, much of the material would have been unbroadcastable for a family audience, But this wasn’t a family audience: it was a room full of lecherous old men (and me) who had come to see the Foxy Fighters, a troupe of topless women who pretended to hold boxing matches. I am not averse to gazing at naked female flesh but even the younger me was embarrassed by what was going on.

There was nothing funny about De Courcey’s ‘adult’ act and nothing remotely erotic about bored-looking semi-naked women in outsize boxing gloves bouncing around in a poor imitation of a boxing ring. And seeing the baying of the hordes of men who seemed to be genuinely enjoying the event, I have to admit I retired to one of the nearby bars to endure a pint of appalling generic lager. I think I may have stayed to the end, although if I did I am not sure why. If I thought, ‘what a way to earn a living’, I should have added ‘what a way to spend your hard-earned money’.

I would pass the venue on numerous occasions, often when on pub crawls with my friends, something I always preferred to trying to ‘pull the birds’, as young men used to call it. Everywhere in the queue there were girls tottering around on massive heels and platform shoes, with gownless evening straps. Most of them looked gorgeous to me, but so did the real ale in the next pub. And the next pub always won. It is a wonder I ever met any girls at all.

I had decided I wouldn’t like clubs like SWX because of what I thought they might be like rather than what they would be like. I preferred the beer in pubs, I preferred the music on pub jukeboxes and, let’s be honest, I was never the world’s sharpest dresser. What and who I was as a youngster is what and who I am today, although I am pretty sure these days I’d give Roger De Courcey and Nookie a wide berth, Foxy Fighters or not.

I hope SWX recovers and returns to providing entertainment to the masses, either by regular nightclubbing events or, increasingly, by hosting gigs, Bristol is not exactly blessed with many top notch venues and SWX appeared to be one of better ones.